← Back to Podcasts
Jon-Paul Ales-Barnicoat headshot

Jon-Paul Ales-Barnicoat

CHRO

Alivecor

Episode 357·December 18, 2025·10:17

Beyond HR Ego: How Authentic Communication Empowers Your People & Mission

0:00-10:17
HR leadershiptalent acquisitioninternal communicationsorganizational scaling

Thesis

Effective HR leadership pivots from individual ego to serving the organization's people and mission, fostering genuine communication and engagement, especially during periods of rapid growth and cultural diversity.

What you'll take away

  1. 1Prioritize genuine, authentic communication from executive leadership to bridge gaps and humanize leadership within dispersed teams.
  2. 2Shift perspective from 'employees' to 'people with lives' to inform more empathetic and effective communication strategies.
  3. 3Leverage informal communication channels like Slack for community building beyond business-related topics.
  4. 4Utilize AI tools to enhance the authenticity, thoroughness, and frequency of internal communications.
  5. 5Embrace a servant leadership mindset, recognizing that senior roles are about enabling others and fulfilling the organizational mission, not personal ego.

What most organizations get wrong

  • Pushes back on the term 'transparent communication' as it can be ambiguous, advocating instead for 'genuine communication' that reflects real thoughts and struggles.

In Jon-Paul's words

The communication gap was significant, and the organization had been through some speed bumps. And so, I introduced a in a LiveCORE leadership series, which is really a fireside chat.

This highlights a specific initiative taken to address a critical communication problem in a growing company.

When you stop thinking about people in their employee persona, and you start thinking about people as people that actually have lives... When you start thinking about people from that perspective, you then start to understand what real communication needs to look like.

This emphasizes a human-centric approach to communication, moving beyond traditional corporate thinking.

The thing that the emerging tool for us that's really helping us from an HR perspective and helping us to really humanize some of our communication is where we've really gone all in on Gemini. We're using Google's AI tool to help us to craft more authentic messages, to help us to make sure that we're being thorough and complete in our communication.

ai-in-hr

This demonstrates a practical, current application of AI in HR for improving communication quality and authenticity.

The more senior you become in the organization, the less about you it becomes. And the more you become a servant to the people, the organization, the mission.

This quote encapsulates a core philosophy of servant leadership crucial for senior HR roles.

The problems this episode addresses

  • Communication gap between executive team and employees in a dispersed, hybrid company (Alivecor, a 15-year-old startup).
  • Difficulty in maintaining genuine, authentic communication across multiple cultures within a growing global workforce.
  • Challenges in humanizing executive leadership and fostering a sense of community in a rapidly scaling organization.
  • Need for tools to craft more authentic, thorough, and complete internal messages to boost engagement.

In this episode

This episode features Previ, the only free tool that helps HR teams boost internal communication

Built by People

John Paul Ailes Barnacote started his career as a recruiter

Built by People: John Paul Ailes Barnacote

Tell me a little bit about your top priorities right now. My top priority is to scale our commercial business globally

Top Three Priorities

Alivecore recently rolled out a leadership series aimed at improving employee communications

Employee Communication at Alivecore

Communication is becoming harder and harder across every organization

Better communication in the workplace

We probably communicate more through Slack than any other tool

What's the Best Communication Tool for Your Organization?

John Paul: I hope people are inspired about the future of the organization

What's Changed at Work in the Last 12 Months?

John Paul shares some parting advice with the Built by People community

John Paul on Leaving the Company

Topics covered

Organizations and entities mentioned

Full transcript

Expand transcript (0 words)

Transcript is not available yet.